Strong violence, coarse language and nudity
(Germany, 2008)
Director: Uli Edel
Featuring: Martina Gedeck, Moritz Bleibtreu, Johanna Wokalek, Bruno Ganz, Nadja Uhl, Jan Josef Liefers, Stipe Erceg, Niels-Bruno Schmidt,
Language: German with subtitles
Running time: 150 minutes
This film reminds us that they didn’t really stand for anything much more than anarchy, even though they – eventually – dressed it up as a desire to ‘free the oppressed’ and destroy US imperialism, as they saw it. They wanted world peace, if you like, even it meant waging war and slaughtering civilians to get it. This much is clear from Bernd Eichinger’s intricate screenplay, but even with Uli Edel’s dedicated direction, the film ends up rather episodic. It’s like watching a historical dramatisation in fast forward, where, inevitably, we miss lots of detail and can only surmise the thrust of the work. (Eichinger also wrote & produced Downfall, a masterpiece of German cinema.)
In trying to cram a great deal into 150 minutes, the filmmakers necessarily jump scenes like puddles, and sometimes the audience gets lost. But the montage style provides the time frame, and shows how the young Baader Meinhof gang gave birth to a whole raft of terrorist clusters and organisations, each growing more violent than the last.
Perhaps the most important function of a movie about the Baader Meinhofs of this world is to reveal their hollow morality, their arrogance and their cruelty; nothing romantic here to entice youngsters to kill innocent civilians in pursuit of peace and freedom. In this respect, the film highlights the absolute failure of politically driven terrorism as an agent of socio-political change.
Finally, I thank the film for its information value about one of the most notorious terror groups of the recent past.
Source: Andrew L. Urban – Urbancinefie. Compiled by Peter Gillard